Kristi Love worked thousands of supervised hours to prepare. She earned a master’s degree in social work from Howard University. She has been uplifting people living in the nation’s capital for over a decade.
“But I can’t call myself a licensed social worker,” she said.
And she is not alone in a field desperate for people like her. Even as rising mental illness, housing instability and other challenges send hiring managers scrambling for licensed social workers, one thing often gets in the way: an antiquated licensing exam.
She’s tried three times to pass it, and always barely misses.
The multiple-choice answers don’t reflect the real-world scenarios social workers face, Love said. Instead, the test focuses on the theoretical ideals of a profession that has always been both noble and flawed, long defined by White intellectuals who try to do good as defined by their worldview.
“As a Black person, coming from Black people and Black professors, that test wants me to think like a White social worker in Idaho,” said Love, who works in the field, but without the pay and opportunities a license would offer her. She speaks often about the disconnect as the president of the Association of Black Social Workers of Metropolitan Washington D.C.
A rising generation of practitioners is pressing the field’s gatekeepers — who extol the virtues of evidence-based service — to examine the facts:
Between 2018 and 2021, 76 percent of White test-takers passed on the first try on the bachelor’s level exam.
Those numbers drop to 52.8 percent for Hispanic applicants, 63.6 percent for Native Americans, 59.6 percent for Asians and 33 percent for Black test-takers, according to an analysis by the Association of Social Work Boards (ASWB), which designs and administers the licensing exams.
Also troubling is a 66 percent pass rate for folks over 50, an obstacle in what is a popular field for career-switchers or people returning to the workforce after their kids get older.
These are all applicants who, like Love, have college degrees in social work, did extensive clinical training and had intense internships. And we’re about to need more of them.
Job openings for social workers are expected to be triple that for other occupations in the coming years, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Advocates of reconsidering licensure — which include the National Association of Social Workers — say the test is not written for all of the test-takers, the communities they trained in and the communities they want to serve.
“It’s very antiquated,” said Valeria Carter, a social worker and director of clinical programs at the Hillcrest Children and Family Center, who failed her first try at the test decades ago and now sees scores of capable college graduates who have logged thousands of clinical hours stumble.
They might answer a question about grief rooted in that front-line experience, she said, instead of reaching for a stages-of-grief framework pioneered in 1969 by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross.
The nation’s reckoning with standardized testing has extended to licensure exams across the nation and in different fields. Some states are reimagining bar exams for lawyers. Like universities charting their own course amid discourse on cultural biases in the SAT, each state sets its own rules on social workers.
Illinois eliminated exams as a requirement for licensure, and in two years the number of social workers there doubled, according to the state’s chapter of the National Association of Social Workers.
The D.C. Council is considering something similar.
“This is a common-sense step that the District can take to make a real, immediate impact on our shortage of social workers,” council member Robert C. White Jr. (D-At Large) said in his introduction of the Social Work License Modernization Amendment Act last year.
The shortage has been profoundly felt in the nation’s capital on several fronts — a dynamic D.C. officials have acknowledged amid scrutiny of the District’s housing programs.
It was clear when officials began clearing encampments and struggled to get people who had been living in tents into housing simply because there weren’t enough licensed case workers to handle the load.
“In the past four years, we’ve had 90 unlicensed social workers apply,” said Will Doyle, a social worker with Pathways to Housing DC. “And we couldn’t hire any of them.”
This is about more than numbers. Clients need access to social workers who understand them.
This is acute in D.C.’s deaf community, one of the largest in the nation thanks to the presence of Gallaudet University.
“Twenty years later and I am not a licensed clinician yet,” said Concetta Pucci, field program assistant and lecturer in the social work department at Gallaudet. Pucci graduated with a master’s degree in social work from New York University in 2002 and failed the licensure test five times. She now has a PhD, but still no license.
“We have 20,000 deaf people living in the DMV area, and we have 10 licensed clinical social work workers who identify as deaf or are fluent in American Sign Language,” Pucci said. And five of them are faculty members at Gallaudet.
There is no data on pass rates for hard-of-hearing applicants, but Judy Mounty, a Gallaudet University graduate who now has a private practice, has studied, written and testified about the difficulties of the exam for years.
“This issue has deprived Maryland of more than 1,200 committed and competent mental health providers, including people of color, older candidates, nonnative speakers of English, and deaf and hard of hearing individuals,” Mounty said in testimony last year in Maryland, which is considering legislation similar to the District’s.
Most who challenge the exam don’t want to do away with licensing altogether. There are arguments for provisional licensing or calls for the association to gather a more diverse group of social workers to rewrite the test to reflect real-life scenarios, rather than classroom theory.
The testing folks admit there’s a problem.
“In this new analysis, we observe that pass rates for some demographic groups are lower than for others, highlighting the need to identify potential steps that ASWB can take to address these differences while adhering to the public protection mandate that guides its mission,” board president Roxroy A. Reid and chief executive Stacey Hardy-Chandler wrote in the introduction to their data study.
Some in the profession worry that an already marginalized and underpaid profession will be further delegitimized if licensing standards are softened or eliminated.
But let’s be honest. Social work is about dynamic, unpredictable and utterly unique things — humans.
Few people understand that, or them, better than Love.
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This article is originally from MSN.com.